If you've banged a mallet on the Pierce's Park xylophone, disembarked at Pennsylvania Station or filled a glass with city tap water, you've encountered the work of Whitman Requardt & Associates.
Founded 100 years ago in Baltimore, the engineering and architectural firm handles some 3,000 projects at a time, making its work near-ubiquitous in the city and throughout the Mid-Atlantic.
The jobs include on-call contracts with the city and State Highway Administration, the proposed Red and Purple lines, the Canton Viaduct bridge where Interstate 895 runs just north of the Harbor Tunnel and two of the biggest dry docks in the Western Hemisphere.
Started in 1915 by Ezra Whitman, an engineer who led the design and construction of the city's Montebello Water Treatment Plant, the firm remains focused on public works, with about 95 percent of its $114 million in revenue sourced to federal, state and local projects, according to managing partner Joseph Makar.
Makar joined the firm in 1993, when it had about 220 employees. Since then, the company has moved from Charles Village to new offices on South Caroline Street, while the workforce has expanded to more than 650, including more than 435 in Baltimore.
Makar, one of four partners, said as the company has grown, it has remained committed to the values of its founders, whose portraits grace one of its meeting rooms.
"We stay true to our roots," he said. "We're still owned and run by technical people. We still care about the product. We have a passion to do it. … We hire people that are like us in the sense that they really care about the product. And I think our clients see that."
Makar recently answered a few questions about the business and how it's changed.
One of the most high-profile projects that you've worked on recently was 26th Street, after it collapsed on April 30, 2014. Was there a part that was particularly complicated from a technical standpoint?
On the 26th Street bridge, we got a call around 5 o'clock in the evening, pouring down rain, and they said, 'We're in trouble, the retaining wall failed.' Within an hour, we had one of our transportation structural engineers, one of our building structural engineers, our geotechnical engineers and our surveyors out there assessing the situation. Several of them stayed all night to figure out what to do. We were on that from the beginning when it collapsed to the very end.
The neat thing about being a local firm is No.1, it impacts us, but No. 2, we have knowledge of what's there. Our geotechnical engineers have been working here 30-some years. They knew immediately the conditions in there. They knew the issues. We could bring in a full team right away that understood the situation and support the city and CSX in solving it and getting it up and running.
There were two parts to it: No. 1, we didn't want any more failure, we wanted to make sure people were safe. And, to be straight-out honest with you, that's one of the main lines for CSX and they had to get it open ASAP. So those two competing things were difficult on how to handle it.
What's the biggest way engineering has changed over 100 years, or even just in the time you've been at the firm?
The biggest change is the use of computers, like in any industry. We have computer programs that do design. We have computer programs that draft. These things are really becoming more of, not just a drafting tool or a design tool, but it's also an asset management tool. You design a building, you draft it in there and then you put basically everything in there so you can manage the assets. So it's really becoming holistic on how we design, manage and maintain facilities.
The biggest change in our industry, besides how we design, is sustainability. If it rains now and your water drains into a storm drain, now it goes through a cleansing before it goes to the bay. We designed a lot of old water treatment plants. We're redesigning them now … to have less impact on the bay. Sustainability is a huge thing in our industry.
As a longtime resident of the Baltimore area, if you could wave a wand and fix an infrastructure problem, what do you think would make the biggest difference?
That's not fair because I'm a transportation guy. I think that from a transportation standpoint … we need to make changes in our transportation network to make sure [the traffic conditions] don't get as bad [as Northern Virginia]. And I don't think that's just roads. I think it's a holistic approach. We look at roads and capacity in roads, we look at transit, we look at pedestrians, we look at bicycles. Because really, you can't build yourself out [of the problem] just adding lanes. There's just too much.
We hear a lot about the dearth of trained people, qualified people in STEM fields. Is it something where you find you can't do the hiring you need to do? Has technology reduced the number of people needed, the way it has in other fields?
Like any industry, it goes up and down. But I would say, long-term, there's definitely a shortage of engineers in our industry.
What's happening now is that not only do we have to expand the profession with respect to the number of people, but there's really no diversity or enough diversity in there, enough women, enough minorities in there, so I think that's a big void.
In transportation, a lot of stuff we do now is in the built environment — look at the Red Line and Purple Line. Well how can you go into a community and not really understand that community? So I think that having the diversity in our workforce helps support us do a better job.
Technology is reducing the need [for workers], but what it's doing more, is that you have to have a lot higher set of skills. Years ago when I first started in the industry, you had a lot of drafters. You could train drafters how to draw. Now you've got to come in and get on this computer. You have to know how to design, you have to do the drawings. … In our industry it's definitely requiring a lot more education to even start. There's not the simple job anymore.
To celebrate your 100th anniversary, the firm threw a party at the Maryland Science Center and commissioned a 15,000-piece LEGO installation of the Baltimore skyline. How did you settle on LEGOs?
I grew up as a kid that liked to build tree forts. And kids who like to build things like LEGOs. So I thought it would really be cool to have something that people could relate to us that's simple.
Joseph Makar
Title: Registered professional engineer; managing partner, Whitman, Requardt & Associates
Age: 59
Hometown: Baltimore
Residence: Reisterstown
Education: Catonsville High School; B.S. in civil engineering, University of Maryland, College Park; MBA, Loyola
Family: Wife and two daughters, ages 18 and 20
Interests/hobbies: Golf, exercise — runs four miles four times a week and attends a spinning class three times a week; recently received a pilot's license